Storme Crow — Chapter 3
When I woke up again, I become aware of a few things. First, it was early evening, and the storm had apparently blown itself out. Second, sometime after I went to sleep, Cassie had joined me, borrowing my now clean Totoro night shirt. She was comfortably warm, but I also became aware of a rather desperate need to pee. I slipped out from under her arm, trying not to wake her, then made my way to the bathroom. The lights had apparently come back on in during the day, and my apartment was cleaner than it had been in months — dishes were washed and put away, laundry had been washed, folded, and put into their respective drawers, the books that had been strewn on the ground were now back up on the shelf, with my own notes and my father’s notebook anchored towards one end.
When I returned to the bedroom, Cass was just waking up. I loved seeing her asleep. When she was awake, Cass was a whirlwind of energy, but asleep it was still easy to see my “little sister” even at twenty-two. She blinked owlishly at me. “I was more tired than I thought.”
“A lot of that going around,” I replied.
“How you doing?”
“Better,” I said, and meant it. I’d run myself ragged, and now I felt peaceful and grounded.
“You were running a pretty nasty fever last night, and started shivering. I almost called the EMTs back, but figured that what you needed more than anything was sleep, so I crawled in beside you to keep you warm. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? No, Cass. I don’t mind. I honestly don’t remember much of what happened, but did have some weird dreams. Thanks for cleaning up.”
“You need a maid service or something. Not saying you’re a slob, Bree, but you get …”
“Distracted?”
“Yeah, distracted is as good a word as any. Speaking of, I need to use the bathroom.”
I was up, and bed really didn’t hold much attraction anymore, so I threw on my default outfit of blue jeans and a graphic-T, this one a picture of a young woman and a dog from a cartoon series, though the bookish bespeckled woman with bobbed brown hair was kitted out in camouflage and holding a flamethrower, and the goofy Great Dane looked much more wolf-like as they faced zombies around their psychedelic van. On top of that I threw on an unbuttoned flannel shirt.
Cass returned a few minutes later, dug into my wardrobe, and headed back to the bathroom, appearing this time in a blue skirt and white lacy blouse, a brilliant blue ribbon in her hair that set off her blue eyes. A stranger looking at the two of us might question that we were related, but our faces actually looked very similar. The Magi heritage showed through.
“Do I really look like that to you?” Cass asked, leaning against the lintel of my bedroom door.
“Like what?”
“All ‘glowy’ like that in the mirror.”
“Yeah. Normally I had learned to ignore it, but it’s much more obvious now.”
“And that’s how you saw my mom?”
I nodded. “Yeah … except that I saw the sickness inside of her too. You’re a healthy young woman, you practically glow with life energy, and there’s kind of this of sparkle of magic in your eyes. Your mom … she had that sparkle, but there was a dull redness I could see running along her lymph glands, and later into her bones and chest. It wasn’t Ch’mael, that feels like oil smoke to me. Just cancer.”
She nodded, a gleam at the corner of her eyes that she quickly hid. I wasn’t the only one dealing with loss, I reminded myself.
“I wonder”, she said, changing the subject. “Would it show the true forms of our people?”
Our people. Magi, fae, morim, maybe even humans with intent, I thought.
“The mirror, I don’t know. I can usually tell when a person is wearing a glamour and get a sense of what’s underneath, though its not always ‘seeing’ in the traditional sense. Dryads have a sense of ‘treeness” to them that I sense as greens, yellows and browns. Elves have stronger overt magical tones — sparkles and swirls. Magis have definite signatures, I can sometimes even tell where their strongest and weakest magics are by the glyphs that surround them. Even people have signatures — most humans tend to have emotional rainbows in their auras. Why do you ask?”
“This is going to sound crazy, but I was thinking about something for the shop that would let the girls know what kind of customer they were serving. Sometimes the Fae tend to forget that they are wearing a glamour, and can be difficult to serve if trying to interpret them as humans.”
“Let me think about that one. I think I can come up with something that wasn’t quite as impromptu … and doesn’t have a menacing monk on the other side.”
I fed Pixel, then by unspoken agreement, we went out to get some food after a brief stop downstairs as Cassie checked in with her small staff. Sheila, Stephanie and Barry were on the afternoon shift, with the grocery store closing when the coffee-shop did at 8pm. While she did store manager things, I went over the wards over the doors and windows of the shop, grimacing at how weak they’d become — or was that just my own perception? Stores, unlike houses, were hard to ward, because you wanted to keep the baleful influences out while at the same time acknowledge that yes, every so often, a vampire may actually come into the store for the sole purpose of buying toothpaste and mouthwash.
Even after the extended sleep, I seemed to still be a lot more sensitive to both magic and life force than I had been. I had previously suspect that Stephanie in particular was Fae, now it was pretty obvious that she was at least part Brownie. They were household “spirits”, mainly from Scotland, and they gravitated to places with ovens and good baking. Cassie was an excellent baker (as was her mother), and somehow I was not in the least surprised that she had attracted the services of a Brownie. Like most of her kind, Stephanie was invariably there at the crack of dawn, invisibly baking, was out the back door just before the morning rush, and almost always knew what would be ordered ahead of time.
Sheila, on the other hand, was a hedge witch — a magi with limited powers but with a good sense of organization that was almost at the same level as Cassie. Sheila usually ran the till, though she could also make a mean espresso, when Barry the Barista wasn’t manning his station. I had a secret, unrequited crush on Barry, tall, dark handsome and could whip up a cappuccino to make an angel weep. However, Barry’s boyfriend was very possessive (rightly so, in my mind) so Barry had become my unofficial big brother instead.
Four auras — I closed my eyes and concentrated instead. Even with my eyes closed, I could still sense where they were, and more intriguing, who they were. Cass was a column of gold and white and blue, smelling of baked bread and cinnamon and honey. Stephanie had the concentrated essence of the Fae, of dough and icing and hardwood floors. Shiela was earthen, motes of brownish energy and ivy bindings, and Barry, luscious Barry, not surprisingly seemed like a rich cup of coffee. Which told me that the associations were in my mind, but intriguingly, there was something that I was tagging those associations with.
Blood? Brain activity?
I sensed Cassie coming back from the impromptu meeting in the back.
“Sorry, Bree, we had to work out the schedules … what are you doing?”
“Cass, do you have earplugs, or something like that?”
“Uh, yeah. Why?”
“Just trying a little experiment. Could you get me a pair? Then I need you and someone else, Barry or Sheila, to come here for just a sec.”
Curious, Cass went to get Barry and the earplugs.
“Hey, Cass,” Barry said in his gloriously deep voice. “Heard you’re pissing off the thunder gods again.”
“It was an accident.”
“I’ve known you for three years, Bree. I’d credit mad science experiment gone wrong before I’d credit accident.”
“Okay, it was a mad science experiment gone horribly wrong. Could you take off your shoes?”
“As long as I’m not hit with lightning, sure.”
Cassie reappeared with a set of wax earplugs. From my purse I brought a couple of sewing needles, some gauze, and a couple of glass slides I carried in a protective box.
“Okay, I need a drop of blood from each of you.”
I cauterized each needle, used them to draw a drop of blood from their respective index fingers, then placed each drop between two glass slides.
“I’m going to turn my back to you and put on these earplugs. Then I want you to put the blood samples somewhere in the room and come back.”
“You realize if the city inspectors walk in at this moment I will be so dead.”
“Cassie, please, this may be important.”
I turned my back, put earplugs in, and thought hard about my father’s book, deliberately trying not to concentrate on their moving forms. A few moments later, Cass touched me on the arm and I took the earplugs out.
“Mind telling me what this is about.”
“One more minute.”
I concentrated on the sensations around me. Cass and Barry were close presences, but I filtered them out. Yet even with that, I could feel something of them. Keeping my eyes closed and turned and pointed. “Cassie, you put your sample that way, about fourteen feet. Barry, yours is over there, maybe eleven feet.”
“Nailed it,” Barry said. “Now what’s going on.”
“Something … strange happened to me yesterday. I’ve been able to see auras and magic since I was in my early teens, but everything right now feel like it’s dialled up to eleven. I can sense where you are even when you’re in the back, and I can sense your blood when it’s not in your body.”
“What, like a vampire?”
“I … no, vampires are more sensitive to sound and smell, kind of like a cat or dog. They can hear your pulse, and probably smell the blood in your veins, but I don’t think this is that. That’s why I ran the experiment. I don’t smell the blood at all, but there’s some weird synaesthesia that lets me sense it. Blood’s pretty simple — plasma, red blood cells, and leukocytes mainly. I’m more inclined to think it’s DNA.”
I closed my eyes again, concentrating on those things that I associated with that “coffeeness” that were part and parcel of my identity for Barry. He had been on the bar today — his sense was all over the pots, towels, and wood, but he didn’t spend much time beyond the bar. Sheila had been on the till, her presence mixed with Cassie’s and Barry’s, but was the most prominent of the three.
“Yeah, I think it’s DNA. Barry, you were on the espresso machines most recently — Sheila not much at all, probably because she was handling the till in Cassie’s absence. So, yeah picking up passive DNA. I can sense that there’s others, but I don’t have enough associations to identify a given signature with a person.”
“So you’re a walking fingerprint lab?” Barry said.
“Sort of? It’s still just a hypothesis.”
“Your ‘hypotheses’ are usually more fully established than most people’s gospel facts. Bree, I love you like a sister, but you’re one strange chick sometimes.”
“Okay,” Cassie said, “let’s shut down for the night. Bree and I are hungry, and I’ve kept the three of you long enough.”
“Excuse me,” Stephanie said, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. “Does the Morning Star need me to clean her domicile?”
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“What would Stephanie prefer?” Cassie said, very deliberately.
“I would be honoured to serve the Morning Star.”
“Um,” I swallowed. I’d been called that in my dream. “I … guess.”
“So mote it be,” Stephanie said, and headed out into the night.
“What just happened?”
“I think you were just adopted by a brownie.”
“She’s a young woman, an independent young woman.”
“She’s an independent young fae woman, Bree. Most Brownies would never ask — they just show up unannounced, and you don’t realize it until you come home to find your laundry folded. What she did was very daring for a Brownie.”
“I … can’t afford to pay her.”
“Bree. First that’s a flat out lie and you know it. Just because you don’t touch your trust doesn’t mean it’s not there. Second, there are protocols, especially for half-fae like Steph. I’ve been planning on letting the other upstairs apartment to her anyway. If you want, you can help cover the rent on that for her. She’s one of the hardest working girls I know, and I will see that she’s not struggling in the face of that.
“Besides that … look, let’s get some food. We need to talk, and I’m hungry.”
